HOUSTON (AP) -- In a confrontation captured on videotape, a hospital security guard fired a stun gun to stop a defiant father from taking home his newborn, sending both man and child crashing to the floor. Now William Lewis says his baby girl suffers from head trauma because she was dropped.

"I've got to wonder what kind of moron would Tase an adult holding a baby," said George Kirkham, a former police officer and criminologist at Florida State University. "It doesn't take rocket science to realize the baby is going to fall."

Lewis, 30, said the April 13 episode began after he and his wife felt mistreated by staff at the Woman's Hospital of Texas and they decided to leave. Hospital employees told him doctors would not allow it, but Lewis picked up the baby and strode to a bank of elevators.

. . .

He said the baby continues to suffer ill effects from the fall.

"She shakes a lot and cries a lot," Lewis said, noting doctors have performed several MRIs on the child, Karla. "She's not real responsive. Something is definitely wrong with my daughter."

Having never played System Shock 2 - or, indeed, any game from Irrational, like other deprived console gamers - Gabriel had no idea what to expect. He wasn't prepared to to be confronted with emotional manipulation on the level that these people are capable of. I say "these people," as though they are some nebulous enemy force, but in some ways this is true. I expect to be wrung dry by these monsters and their devil priest, Ken Levine. One does not typically load up a shooter and, within the space of ten minutes, bear witness to a sobering meditation on loss.

One need not absorb that meditation, and indeed one may cut it short with violence, but most games don't even attempt to engage the player on this level. I'm not suggesting that we as gamers are affixed to a decrepit industry and that, through violent revolution, narrative power must become the only currency of the medium. But when it does happen, when a game tells a story so holistically, we should certainly recognize it.

In terms of raw Gameplay, it looks like a first person action game, but that term usually means something specific about how story is delivered. That is to say, it is not delivered. You can't really thresh out the genre in the classic way, because it has the eloquent world building we usually associate with Adventure Games, and depending on how stingy they are with resources could very easily be called Survival Horror. It doesn't seem to know - or care - what genre it is.

August 14, 2007

HAMAMATSU, Shizuoka -- A motorcyclist traveled for two kilometers without noticing his right leg had been severed after hitting a median strip on a toll road here early Monday morning, police said.

The 54-year-old man noticed that his right leg had been cut off about 10 centimeters below the knee when he arrived at an interchange on the Hamana Bypass of Route 1 in Hamamatsu. Another motorcyclist traveling with him returned to the median strip to pick up the severed leg. He was rushed to a local hospital with his severed leg in an ambulance.

Investigators suspect that the pain from the injuries was so severe that he did not notice that his leg had been severed.

What's a country to do with a millions-strong plague of crop-munching rodents? Ideas abound for Spain's Castille-Leon region to quell its infestation: Burn them. Drown them. Choke them with engine exhaust. Squish them with a rolling pin attached to a plow.

Then there's this high-tech doozy from a government veterinarian: Zap these mouse-like animals called voles with earsplitting ultrasound, using a cross between the Pied Piper ploy and a military pincer movement to herd them together for a collective death blow with water or fire.

. . .

Voles give off a characteristic odor and the plague is so intense you can smell the critters — live ones, not rotting bodies — as you drive around, he said.

"The other day I was driving along the highway and the smell was overpowering," Pinero said from Valladolid, the regional capital.

Grain crops have been devastated and the voles are now turning their appetites to summer crops like potatoes, grapevines and beets.